Commerce along the Houston Ship Channel flows under the vigilant eye of the U.S. Coast Guard.

It helps mariners navigate, maintains buoys and other aids, secures the waterway and enforces a broad range of regulations.

Adm. Karl Schultz leads the effort from Washington. He became the 26th Commandant of the Coast Guard on June 1. During a recent trip to Houston, he spoke with Texas Inc. about Hurricane Harvey, maritime trends and a favorite founding father.

Q: What leadership skills have you learned from the Coast Guard that could be applicable to CEOs or corporations in the private sector?

A: The world is getting more complicated. The ships we’re on today are getting bigger, and they’re going to be autonomous ships in the not too distant future. No one agency, hence no one leader, has their arms around all of that complexity. You’ve got to partner with folks, so collaboration is key. How do you collaborate? You have to have good communication skills. You’ve got to listen more than you talk. You have to know what you’re the expert on, and you have to recognize other peoples’ expertise.

Q: Are ships getting too big?

A: I don’t know if vessels are getting too large, but they are getting larger. When you’re talking about a cruise ship that has 6,000 people to potentially north of 8,000 people on board, god forbid there was some kind of crisis at sea. Rescuing that many people is a lot different than rescuing 1,500 or 1,800 people of yesteryear. But the ships are exponentially more sophisticated. They have safety systems that are more advanced. I think the technology offsets some of the size. The industry is going to invest in what’s efficient and safe, so I don’t know if we get to decide how big those ships are. We just need to make sure we match our knowledge, our ability, to help regulate that space around the reality of those changes.

Q: What focus is the Coast Guard putting on cybersecurity?

A: On the Internet, we ride on the Department of Defense .mil system (much of the federal government is a .gov). To stay compliant and be on that .mil system - and that’s where we need to be for the national security work the Coast Guard enables - we’ve got to invest a certain degree of money and a certain degree of our cyber efforts on just staying relevant and adherent to the DOD standards. I’d say that’s the first bucket of where we put energy and resources for cyber. Second would be as a regulatory agency. We’ve got to put guidance out there. And to that end, we just commissioned a cyber major out of our Coast Guard Academy. The major just started. And the third piece is, how do you use cyber in Coast Guard front-line operations? We commit a lot of energy against criminals smuggling drugs into the country or potentially smuggling migrants on the maritime approaches to the United States. Is there a way to use cyber in those spaces?

Q: Have you come out with cyber regulations yet?

A: Our role to date has been on the informing side. We’re working on a Navigation and Vessel Inspection Circular (NVIC), which would be an instructive, best-practice type guide. But we’re stepping methodically into that space. Cyber is an evolving mission. It’s a competitive space, and there’s a shortage of cyber professionals. So we’re easing into it as we build out our own capabilities. If we don’t have the technical skillsets to be a common-sense regulator, we shoot our own credibility in the foot. So it’s a bit of establishing our own capabilities and then taking that to industry in a constructive fashion where it’s a partnership.

Q: Turning to Hurricane Harvey, what was the Coast Guard’s role during the storm?

A: During Harvey, our immediate role was response to people in distress. Working with state and local and federal partners, the Coast Guard was involved in 11,000-plus rescues. On an average year across the Coast Guard, we rescue 20,000 to 24,000 people. So we rescued almost half as many people as we do on an annual basis in a three-day window down here. And that was pretty intense. We have three helicopters at base here in Houston. During Harvey, we had 40-plus helicopters flying down here. So we ramped up at an unprecedented level.

Q: And what happened after that initial search-and-rescue portion?

A: Get beyond the immediate distress, you start to look at what it takes to reconstitute the port. The key part is getting commerce going again because we’re a just-in-time economy. Closing the port affects stuff on Walmart shelves. This is the largest petrochemical port in our nation, and what goes on down here ties to the availability of gasoline in the Northeast. We also had cruise ships that were hankering to get into Galveston and offload passengers. So we wanted to make sure the harbor was reopened as quickly as we could.

Q: What was your specific role during Hurricane Harvey? It was before you became Commandant.

A: I was the Atlantic Area Commander when Hurricane Harvey occurred. My job was to manage the political layer above. To provide the Capt. Kevin Oditt’s of the world, he’s sector commander of the Coast Guard’s Houston-Galveston sector, with clear operation guidance on what they could or couldn’t do because they were making decisions different from day-to-day stuff. We were flying helicopters in 300-foot visibility and torrential rains in an urban environment. We don’t do that. We fly helicopters over the water, and sometimes in the rain but not what we did here. So the ability to give them the power of decision making, that was helpful.

Q: What are the biggest challenges for the Coast Guard right now?

A: My No. 1 priority is readiness. That’s money to maintain our ships, invest in training for our people, protective equipment for our folks. It’s the day-to-day running of the Coast Guard. And the operating and support side of our budget has been pretty flat for the last eight years. We’ve done pretty well on capital dollars, money to buy new ships and other equipment, but we’ve been stretched on operating. So I need to really work on a strong narrative to take to the Administration and Congress. One of my other challenges is the competition for human capital. For talent. We’ve got the best, the brightest Coast Guard men and women we’ve ever had, but they have a lot of choices. And I’m not sure millennials think about 20-, 30-year careers like my generation did. So how do we attract talent, retain talent? And I would like America’s Coast Guard to look more representative of the nation we serve. About 15 percent of our workforce is female. I think we would be better if we approximated a 50 percent female workforce. When you look at underrepresented minorities, we have some opportunities to look more like the nation. We’re trying to recruit from all corners of the country. I want America’s Coast Guard to really be representative of the people we serve.

Q: And what’s an opportunity for the Coast Guard?

A: The Coast Guard has an opportunity to tell the story about how the marine transportation system contributes to the nation’s economy every day. We do a lot of critically important work there.

Q: I have to ask about Hamilton, since you discussed the musical this morning during the Lone Star Harbor Safety Committee meeting. Have you seen it?

A: I have not seen the Hamilton play. And if I was a betting man, I would have lost a lot of money years back if someone had asked me about Hamilton done as a rap musical. I didn’t think the nation would catch on to our founding father. Hamilton is a very important figure for the United States Coast Guard. He had the concept of a Coast Guard back in 1790 when he commissioned 10 ships to go out and collect tariffs, revenues to support the Revolutionary War. He saw that people trying to evade enforcement were taking to the water. And that’s really how the Coast Guard started in its early days.